305. Into the West

Completed 1st assignment earlier. Frankly really tired. Too many words – liked finding third person hypothesis – watch out students for Oligopoly game – I’m gonna rest now…..

304. Web 2.0 everything anyone needs to know

http://mediastudies2point0.blogspot.com/

303. Journey: Part 6

A few weeks later (in July) and the topic area seems to have been precipitating into something more manageable:

 

1.      I am staying with the broad idea of Media Institutions, power and ideology.

2.      Murdoch seems ever more contentious and accessible to students, so I will case study him and Newscorp in some detail, focusing on convergence of ownership and how Newscorp is perceived and challenged by regulation.

3.      I am not pursuing textual analysis of a specific issue at this point. It seems to go beyond the scope of what I intend.

4.      To inform my teaching and that of my first audience ( fellow professionals who work with late teenage media students), I will try to create a simple board game to develop my ideas for making the learning real.

Finally I found the ‘lens’ through which to focus my investigation: This led to a broad topic:

 

Media and Power: How can we recognize the relationship between the media industries,  their audiences and government with specific focus on Newscorp.

 

Dennis McQuail (2000) suggests that key aspects of media power may be

summarized as follows:

_ attracting and directing public attention;

_ persuasion in matters of opinion and belief;

_ influencing behaviour;

_ structuring definitions of reality;

_ conferring status and legitimacy;

_ informing quickly and extensively.

The following headings emerged:

 

• News Media, ownership and ideologies
• Audience theories and validity

Agenda Setting and Moral Panics

302. Journey: Part 5

PEST – Political – power etc seems obvious with major political shifts seemingly going hand-in-hand with media relationships, also economic with the growth of super-corporations and enormous profits enabling globalization of media brands. Sociocultural – in terms of audience manipulation and re-action.to media. and Technological. The technical side seems to be where I am currently very strong on, maybe therefore not the essence of this particular study. I will therefore refer to the influence of especially New Media in passing only.

Finally perhaps to find if the legendary Thamus was correct when he said the following:

“And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.” Whether this is true of the audience or my students…

 

301. Journey: Part 4

3. I started by doing a small focus-group with A2 Media students asking a few questions concerning these issues – the result will be podcast soon. I also designed a short questionnaire specifically aimed at media students. These will be my final clients, so it seems a good idea to start engaging them from where their experience lies.

 

 

4. I also plan to do a spot of in-depth textual analysis( news-values and inferential structures – looking at tele-visual codes signs etc,), perhaps covering how sky, BBC and Fox cover the same story/or newspapers, perhaps the 9/11 issue – students will be able to plug into this in terms of representation.

5. I will also look into regulation, de-regulation and how the institutions carry the power to actually change policy, and technology, but not to the same scale.
6. I have always been interested in the concept of learning through games and as such the actual idea at the moment is to design a teaching tool, kind of Oligopoly – a Monopoly –style game where the owners can change the rules as they go along, buy each other and the cash will have to be Zimbabwe-scale notes! The challenge will to create an artifact that will be a sensible teaching tool in an ever-changing audience- environment. The collision of world-views in the classroom – the eg. almost Stalinist control over access to sites students access freely outside, may also need looking into. Maybe even a secondlife-style game to learn? (Shooting way above my tech skills here!)

 

 

7. I will start the final part by reflecting on my own current practice in teaching this topic, leading through my journey in this project and concluding with the new/refined insights I may gather. The action plan will inform my planning and delivery for the new year.

300. Journey: Part 3

The project developed through a few stages:

After a few weeks of research I found a quote that seemed to combine the areas of investigation that I am concerned with:

“A focal question for the political economy of communications is to
investigate how changes in the array of forces that exercise control over cultural production and distribution limit or liberate the public sphere.
This directs attention to two key issues. The first is the pattern of
ownership of such institutions and the consequences of this pattern for control over their activities. The second is the nature of the relationship between state regulation and communications institutions.”
(Golding and Graham Murdock  in  Curran and M. Gurevitch )

The above quote touches succinctly on the areas of media institutions that I am interested in. I will try to address it in the following ways:

1. Addressing the concept of media institutions on a global scale and specifically the real or imagined political control that the news media (television and press) seem to have. I have tried to steer away from a Murdoch-bash, but very little is found

 in my research on quite the scale of reaction to anything Howard Stringer (Sony), Robert Iger, (Disney), Jeffrey Lawrence Bewkes (Time Warner) Sumner Murray Redstone (Viacom) or Hartmut Ostrowski (Bertelsmann) does. Murdoch seems to be unique in his personal media profile, the information available and the re-action to him in both academic writing and the popular media. He also seems to be the archetype of the media mogul so easily vilified by critics. As a result of his unashamed high profile, the students also seem to have a recognition of the Murdoch name. After all:
 

“I did not come all this way not to interfere.”

(Rupert Murdoch, in Seymour-Ure, 1995)

 

2. I will look into a potted history of ownership of the big media institutions, specifically convergence in terms of media ownership rather than technology

(as explored for example by Henry Jenkins). I will try to gain some understanding around the actual power wielded by an individual who seems to engage with up to 80% of the world’s population. This will inevitably lead into watchdogs and various audience models (cultivation theory and media imperialism included) and how current thinking links into the real/perceived effects of news. The possible ‘dumbing down’ (what Redmond (44) describes as “vulgar, popularist, low brow and ‘entertaining’) of journalism needs a look into, concepts of ‘the trusted source’ from our residential.

 

299. Journey: Part 2

Redmond (5) nails the intrinsic challenge of this part of media teaching to teenagers as follows “How, teachers ask, can one get students to enjoy critically or get relevant meaning from something as potentially turgid as, for example, the discussion of power and control in the broadsheet press, or public service broadcasting in the 1990s?”. He believes the answer is threefold: That, as teachers and students, we should discover “that there is critical pleasure to be had in studying media institutions” (ibid.) and that we should have confidence in that fact. He also discusses that students should see the value in relating institutions as  media ‘texts’ in exactly the same way as any media text can be studied. These ‘texts are  to be considered against the student’s own life experiences.  Thirdly, Redmond argues “ we can directly pleasure the experience of teaching media institutions by introducing practical work in to the delivery of the topic.”(ibid.) He suggests exercises of media products used and simulations like contests and decision-making exercises. These seem sensible ways into developing arguments and learning models for delivering the topic.

 

 I investigated my own teaching practice in relation to the topic which, upon refelection, I found consisted mainly of the following processes:

1.      Introduction to topic, establishing vocabulary of principal terminology and events.  (Found in the following examples on my media blog:

2.      Case studies of big media institutions,

3.      Mock examinations with feedback,

4.      Examinations.

 

My main concern is that students did not own their own learning to the level that I would have hoped for. Significantly in mock examinations, they seemed to be regurgitating my words rather than their own findings, even if these findings were different to what I had taught in class.

 

298. Journey: Part 1

A common question I am faced with in regards to Media ownership is: Does it matter that only a few corporations/individuals own/control swathes of the media landscape? This relates in research terms to ownership, state and self-regulation, looking at both sides of media commentary.

 

In identifying a specific area of debate, I first delved into where my own delivery of the topic lay. I am mostly tasked to deliver on A-level Media the topic: Audiences and Institutions. I have had some success in academic terms as the results of my students in real and mock examinations have always been good and improving. I, and many other professionals that I have discussed the area with, have however, often been frustrated by our own lack of updated knowledge about recent developments and also our own processes of delivering the subject. In fact many media teachers do not have the confidence to freely discuss power and control in media and government relationships.

 

Therefore the significant audience for this study is the media teacher/tutor who may find delivering the concept of Media industry/institutions challenging. This may be because the teacher is without current industry experience, may never have had any experience, or may be rusty in this area of the subject and for any number of other reasons. The main thrust into the area is to enlighten myself of the present situation.  The outcome envisioned is a tool to engage the student of media in a kinesthetic way and that can be used by the teacher as a starting point to research and to produce an artifact that will be useful for myself and fellow professionals alike in delivering what is often perceived as a very dull area of the subject.

 

297. Oligopoly here we come!

Just found monopoly template at

http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/monopoly-photoshop-template

 

asked permission to use in MACME – things going OK right now – just this big headache from concentrating for longer than a Gerbil…

296. agenda setting – moral panics – mode of address

Yup – teeth into the stuff! Politics, spin ownership regulation…

295. OK 8 1/2 days to go..

Good week – got some relevant stats & quotes about Blair & Murdoch – Jeez, but I never knew quite how powerful these guys are/were… Frantically trying to get theorists on both sides of media power argument to talk to each other – marx vs pluralist, current scores marx 10, pluralists 7, renier 3 – so many media theorists, so little time…

294. Do not pass Go – go straight to Yale

http://classes.yale.edu/film-analysis/index.htm

293. What an elegant time-waster….

http://www.neave.com/television/

292. Mediaedu single production competiton

From September 2008 Mediaedu will be running a single production competiton with two entry levels. The competition will be judged by a senior examiner. The winners will have their artefacts exhibited on Mediaedu.co.uk and the schools’ local press will be informed.

This competition is designed to test students’ technical skill and creativity in production.

Prizes

We have great prizes for each level of this competition. First prizes are an iPod Touch, with runners up receiving iPod Shuffles.

Entries for this competition must be received by:

Friday, 22nd May 2009

The competition will require you to do the following: 

1. Create a recognisable production artefact. This could be print, moving image, photography, animation, website – anything which falls within the Media Studies production remit. 

The artefact must be original and not use any copyrighted material or characters, including music. 

2. Your work needs to be of high quality as it will be published on the site and then judged by a senior examiner. 

3. In order to do this you will be asked by your teacher to complete a Web Usage Permission Slip before you can take part in online competitions. 

4. Email entries for the GCSE, BTEC First Diploma and OCR Level 2 competition to Level2@mediaedu.co.uk.Email entries for the AS & A Level, BTEC & OCR Nationals competition to

Level3@mediaedu.co.uk. 

All emails must include the student’s full name, school and address with teacher’s full name and contact email address. You must also indicate the level your work should be entered for e.g. Level Two or Three 

6. Please ensure that you have a completed a Parental Web Usage Permission Letter and had it approved by your Headteacher and Head of Department.

291. Comprehensive Magazine site

http://www.magforum.com/index.htm

290. And on the right hand side – 1000 views for members of me!

Yup! Caterine and Jessica’s have been viewed 1000 times on youtube! Now if you only had one pound for every…

 

Well done gals! Here’s the link: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=34245210